Addictive books

[Bridget69]

I never read anything more than once. I have so many books on my shelf waiting to be read, I don't have the time to read something twice. LOL!

 

[shereads]

I reread Robert McCammon's Swan song twice a year. I also reread all of Jane Austen and Jane Eyer by Bronte.

I'm still miffed at Mr. Rochester for keeping the wife in the attic. I wasn't, until I saw the movie, "Wide Sargasso Sea," a prequel to Jane Eyre from the wife's point of view: the arranged marriage, her homesickness for Jamaica, her growing isolation in the face of her husband's resentment; her failure to become a properly docile Victorian wife; the interpretation of her passionate nature as madness. When she finally burns down the house, as in Jane Eyre, she's reenacting the destruction of her home in Jamaica and making her presence known to the world in the only way left to her.

Rochester, you miserable bastard! You married for money and she was too much woman for you. Jane, wake up and smell the toast. So to speak.

Did we have this exchange before?


Edited to add: The movie, "Wide Sargasso Sea" is based on a book by Jean Rys. I didn't know that. Every google reveals something new.

 

[Belegon]

LotR is one for me too...also George R.R. Martin and R.A. Salvatore in that vein.

Shakespeare of course...

The Killer Angels by Michael Sharra

lots of varied history books, both "historical fiction" and actual history.

"The Science of Hitting" by Ted Williams.

 

[shereads]

Thank you, Dar. I know it was inadvertent but your mention of Jane Eyre prompted a memory that prompted a google that led to the discovery of the book behind a movie I liked, and an author I didn't know who sounds like she'll be worth reading.

A depressed writer, no less! "Too sad for the world" and "troubled by a vast loneliness." Just what I need to cheer me down a bit.



I think I've found my next literary obsession.

Glowing editorial review at amazon. I can hardly wait.

In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."

The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

. . . Rochester, you miserable bastard! You married for money and she was too much woman for you. . . "Wide Sargasso Sea" is based on a book by Jean Rys. . .

I thought that Rochester was dating Josephine, Mary Livingstone's maid. I'm not certain of this, but going strictly by sound, Rochester probably was Andy Devine's brother.

Since it's growth depends upon extra warm, clear water, in these days of Global Warming, has anyone bothered to keep tabs on the Atlantic sargassum bed that Christopher Columbus encountered?

I've asked this question before, haven't I?

Does anybody remember answering it?

Added:

Thanks for that Amazon citation, shereads.

It has inspired me to write a version of Pride And Prejudice examining the unconsummated love between Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

 

[shereads]

Since it's growth depends upon extra warm, clear water, in these days of Global Warming, has anyone bothered to keep tabs on the Atlantic sargassum bed that Christopher Columbus encountered?

I once co-owned a house that turned out to be built on that. We tried to think of it a boat and the foundation as a concrete hull, but nothing worked.

 

[Dar~]

I really enjoy emily dickinson also . . .Hmm must pull that out. (ps: I just submitted three Haikus, haven't written one in years hope all goes well)

 

[CharleyH]

tell us which book you want us to diss? THEN we are going somwhere

 

[Poussin]

.....

 

[shereads]

tell us which book you want us to diss? THEN we are going somwhere

Start a Despised Books thread. Post a poll. I'll be there, dressed to dis.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Rochester, you miserable bastard! You married for money and she was too much woman for you. Jane, wake up and smell the toast. So to speak.

Well, if you will read about the dull Rochester ...

Might I suggest John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester.

Much more interesting.

 

[shereads]

Well, if you will read about the dull Rochester ...

Might I suggest John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester.

Much more interesting.

A God-haunted atheist, pornographer and panegyrist of "that lost thing (Love)," misogynist and protofeminist...

I remember him. His screen name was JW_ 2Earl. He hasn't posted here in ages. You know how those protofeminists can be, and the worst of the lot are the God-haunted pornographer misogynist protofeminists. They scare easily.

 

[TheEarl]

I remember him. His screen name was JW_ 2Earl. He hasn't posted here in ages. You know how those protofeminists can be, and the worst of the lot are the God-haunted pornographer misogynist protofeminists. They scare easily.

No! I've never had an alt! What makes you accuse me in that way! That's slanderous!

<ahem>

Shogun. I have to race through it, unable to put it down unless I absolutely must. I know it all so well, yet when I reach the end I want to turn the book over and start again to continue the life of John Blackthorne.

The Earl

 

[thebullet]

the worst of the lot are the God-haunted pornographer misogynist protofeminists. They scare easily.

Shereads, you always make me laugh.

There are several books I seem to pick up in the face of massive numbers of unread books staring me in the face (is that redundent?):
I love Miss Marple. I would have liked to have married her in her old age, just to be around all of those murders. I have reread The Tuesday Night Club many, many times. A Miss Marple short story is kind of like an addictive piece of chocolate. No matter how many times you eat it, you want it again. I like the Miss Marple novels as well. My favorite (and truly hilarious) is Murder in the Vicerage. Agatha Christie of course

Strangely, I'm not so hot about Hercule Pirot. Go figure.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer
I've read this damn book time and time again. It's like 1200 pages long but is endlessly fascinating and disturbingly appropriate in 21st century America. No shit. Also by Shirer: Berlin Diary - life in 1930's Berlin - it's as if the whole world were populated by 21st century republicans. Hear no evil/speak no evil/believe anything you are told. Damn it's scary.

Other constant rereads: Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Catcher in the Rye - Sallinger
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Heinlein
Dune - Herbert

I have the complete works of Ellery Queen in my library and recycle through them a lot, but I prefer the stuff written in the 1940's. The New Adventures of Ellery Queen is a good place to start if interested. Short stories and good ones.